Last days in La Paz

---

After I got back from Lake Titicaca I hung out in La Paz waiting for the
approval to come from Santiago for my student visa.

For a while.

I had already gotten the approval in Bruxelles but skipped out because of
maddening Belgian bureaucracy (19 days of waiting then Oh, sorry, no
appointments for another 2 weeks. I left the next day from grey belgian
5-hour day winter for Peru. Call me crazy), so I applied for my visa after Izzy
left, thinking it would be a fast approval. Nope... The thing about Chile is that
they actually do things that first-world countries do except with third-world
efficiency. Well. That was my impression from the consulate. After 2 months
of being a gringo in south america, I was annoyed when the entire consular
system of Chile didn't go into Red Alert for the gringo in Bolivia who wanted his
visa so I could get it instantaneously...


Every day I would wake up in my window-less room, and stumble down the hill
to get rolls because since my hostal was a little more up-scale, they served
processed food at breakfast: wonderbread, transfatty crackers, and bolivian
Sunny D.
Then I would go down to call the consulate (there is no Chilean embassy,
because about 140 years ago the bad Chileans stole the Bolivian's sea-access
and the Bolivians are all sore losers and don't want to make normal
diplomatic relations and the Chileans are like well, right back at you, Mr. Huffy, and
so that's why there's no embassy in La Paz)... trying to suppress the nerves that were building up because This was the 12th day calling, why should I have any more hope that the visa would come? And of course there was No reply yet, sorry, call tomorrow.

So I´d walk around town, go to my gym, come back, eat lunch for $.65 or dinner for $.25, stay up ´reading´ Gabriel Garcia Marquez´s El Amor en Los Tiempos del Colera (that is, marking down a page´s worth of unknown words for a page read), until the Olympic highlights came on at ´midnight´ (0:15, 1:30, whatever) these consisted of a sleepy commentator who didn´t have the least idea of what was going on (he always seemed mystified that people would want to be outside in that kind of weather), with a wrap-up of how the athletes ´From Our Region´ did. This consisted mostly of a few Argentine sisters flailing down and usually crashing on slopes no one south of Innsbrûck should be allowed on, and one Brazilian bobsleigh team that capsized 1/3 of the way down and slid the rest of the way on their helmets.

My gym was pretty cool...One day I tried to go to the spinning room (which is completely devoid of bikes) to do some yoga (aaahh...) but got so many stares from the ladies in there that it was kind of ridiculous. It´s kind of wierd enough already because no matter what every time you walk round or lift or drink water or burp people are watching you. I feel bad for the bolivian homies that really are ripped and strut round when I´m there, because they´re getting upped by a gangly, skinny gringo ... anyways, I was trying to be off by myself in the small room, but after 10 minutes there were 15 women crowded in un-subtley watching me. Finally one interrupted me and asked what on earth I was doing. They had heard of yoga, just never knew what it was. So then for the next half-hour I got machine-gun interrogated by this girl. She was amazing. It was like talking to a spanish-language tape. Where are you from? What is your favourite part of La Paz? Do you like bicycling, walking, or other such sports? What is your favourite food? ... each time she would open
her eyes really wide and ask in precise sentences her question, like a soap-opera actor (turns out she LOVES Cuerpo de Deseo, the telenovela I happened to have on a few times in between coming home and going to the gym. Couldn´t break it to her that I was laughing the whole time)... She wanted to bring me to her favourite vetegarian restaurant, but I wasn't in any danger of being courted. I asked her about a movie called American Visa, a bolivian movie that´s playing down here... she said Yes, it was good, but - but - it had some, ah prohibited scenes! What? You know, scenes where under-14 aren´t allowed! She blushed. I didn´t think bolivians could blush.
Ha.

It´s not that the days weren´t interesting - I had enough to do and would usually talk with people on the street or in a park, and Carnaval was coming so La Paz was getting lively, and people were streaming in from the country-side to sell, buy, drink, or, rarely, steal - but the purgatory-ish day-to-day uncertainty of my situation made it impossible to do anything productive. One thing that kept me from walking round town too much was the evil black smoke that the old japanese vans and cars spew out as they struggle up the hills, and that hangs in the air, and you have no choice but to breathe it in... some mornings I would spit black.

The approval finally came on February the 23rd … 14 days after starting it all. Plus the 19 days waiting in Bruxelles.
- So I can come right now and get the visa, right?
- Of course not. You are approved, and then you must wait till the next day…

So I went round getting organized for My Last Day in La Paz. Carnaval was the weekend coming up, and so the streets were packed with vendors, selling confetti and water-pistols and old Halloween costumes made in China and balloons and little rolled confectioner´s sugar with paste inside … every stand was a little riot of the colour spectrum, a Hatfield and McCoy- style feud between the ROYs and the BIVs, spattered messily all over people, shops, buses, and restaurants. A festival of colours where it´s already an optical fire-works show…
Unfortunately, the carnaval goings-on was a little to distracting and I got my all-time favourite old bag slashed (Nothing taken … I was on my way to the gym. I wish they´d taken my grungy gym underwear).

But at the gym I met a cool kid, Chris, who helped me repair it and invited me to a little kiosk where we got fruit smoothies for 25 cents. I met his family and saw their little jewelry shop, met his girlfriend and her family´s little restaurant, and we talked about immigration and work and opportunity and life and things any 20-year olds anywhere talks about except he wanted to go to Belgium to find work and be more worldly and modern and learned, but I was coming to Bolivia for the same things. Or to get away from them. I´m still not sure.

I had gone to the bus station but there were no bus tickets till the next day, so I was to leave saturday at 6am. He invited me to go water-ballooning with his friends - you walk the streets with a bag of balloons, hiding from the policemen (not in the way drunk CU kids hide from the Boulder PD - there are thousands of policemen in full body-armour and semi-automatic weapons on every street. They wouldn´t even bother with rubber bullets...), and chuck balloons at girls, who scream and run and yell at you but secretely love it or else they wouldn´t be down on the main street of La Paz on an afternoon of Carnaval, walking slowly and pretending not to notice anything. Picture something you see of footage from Panama City or Caracas (or, Bolivia, actually), some Latin-American hot-spot, where people are milling round and then running and there are random bursts of gunfire or bombs and then it´s chaos - that´s exactly how this was. Up the road you could see salvos of dozens of water-balloons being chucked back & forth across the road, as intense a fire-fight as any in Columbia … a combi would drive by and someone inside would let loose with a Chinese-made super-soaker … snipers sitting on roofs or balconies would launch their ordnance and still have time to duck and hide before it hit their target … the less subtle would just launch a few balloons high over a crowd listening to a vendor or throw a water balloon at you from point-blank range …

I wondered why there wasn´t much water-ballooning before-hand, like in Ayacucho. Now I knew they saved it all up for the 3 days of carnaval.

I met up with Christopher and his friends down near the university … a scene of utter chaos except everyone was grinning. What happened was I had been sitting back watching my friends and the whole scene, not feeling particularily combative, until some show-off made a big thing about hitting the gringo (ok, I stood out a little), and threw one at me. He clipped my wrist (only ´cause I let him), but all the month´s worth of whining loafs coming up and trying to be friendly when after 5 min they just asked for money, the kids that wanted me to give them gifts (nice bracelet. Can I have it?), the people shouting from cars ´gringo´ or ´bush´ and then laughing like they´d just brought down the Apollo, people trying to short-change me (not very smoothly though - they´d say their price and then give me the wrong change… assuming I couldn´t count right, I guess, when they could have charged 3 times the amount for grapes I would have never known). Basically my frustration of being discriminated against the way 50% of the US has to deal with every day, a month´s worth of ´just keep walking´ came out as I wound up, trying to resurrect the 12-year old All-Star 2nd baseman somewhere in me - found him, and whipped a fast-ball across that kid´s face, knocking out the cigarette he was about to light.

Ok, not that Zorro-style. But pretty close: I nailed his arm, hard, causing him to drop his bag of balloons. Yes! It was the first intentionally vaguely violent thing I´d done (outside of sports) to anybody in years, but I felt somewhat justified, even though the poor kid was a total scape-goat.

I turned round to watch what my group was doing but they were all turned watching me, silent, mouths open. Being the only one with any sort of cultural back-ground that actually uses their arms (turns out you can´t kick water balloons, though I saw people try. Seriously), and having the advantage of height for spotting and torque purposes, I became the designated group long-range sniper bomber. They would pick out a group of girls and I would usually be able to tag ´em. I felt, with a guilty pleasure, like Michael Caine in ´Zulu,´ using foreign fire-power and know-how on a defense-less, but brave, population.

The next morning I got up at four and caught the bus to Chile.

The bus to Arica was late, of course. The one in the quai had some problem, so I went up to talk with some Norwegian girls I´d met, also going to Arica … then saw my bus go by, and ran it down, 200 back-pack heavy metres later, only to find out it wasn´t going to Arica anymore… I went back to the quai - the new bus was for 34 passengers rather than the original 44, so the last 10 people were almost politely shoved out the door and then we were off. I had no more food because they day before I had given the very last of my Bolivianos to Mike, a Puerto-Rican from the Bronx… he came up to me on the main street, the Prado, I could see him coming, his eyes searching the crowd, and they lit up when they fell on me. - Do you speak English? I thought about that. Obviously, he wanted something. But he seemed interesting. I decided to use a trick I learned freshman year (that, in retro-spect, got me into more trouble than anything else) - pretending to ´speak a leettul.´ I nodded a so-so yes. - Oh Thank God!
Apparently he´d won a trip to Bolivia from his union, but then got put in the San Pedro jail for 11 months. He´d just gotten out, he said, and wondered, could I spare like 10 Bs, man, to call my mom to get a money-order to get me a plane ticket home …? He was small and wiry and really intense in a relaxed way. I would use the analogy ´like an ADD kid who´s smoked waay too many joints,´ except I´m almost positive that´s exactly what he was.

I said Let´s go mek phone cull, eh? And we went off to find a phone center. He told me his ´story,´ bouncing along the pavement and gesturing up at me to emphasize his points (´TWO bs for a shower, man,´and he jabbed two fingers in my ribs). The story was full of holes, though - he had been scampering through the streets faster than I could walk, talking fine, but then he got to the part about how they only let you exercise a little bit and then he slowed down and panted. I was captain of high school sports long enough to know when someone is pretending to be tired and wants me to feel sorry for them. Also, what the hell kind of union is it where you win a trip to Bolivia? I think he suspected my ¨I don´t speak much english¨ story too, so we were even. He went into a center, put in a call to Bethesda, Maryland, and then quickly hung up after a few seconds. -Answering machine … and slipped the change into his pocket.

So that´s why I didn´t have the 10 bs to buy food for the (supposedly) 9-hr bus ride. And anyways, his story was definitely creative enough to merit the $1.25. Definitely needed work, though. I could see through his story easier than the nappy-haired twitching coke-cases that come round the plazas selling candies ( - Uh, for a children´s home. Uh, the uh, House of Youth, yeah, House of Youth. Um, they don´t accept volunteers, just buy the goddamn candy, ok?). And besides he wasn´t whining or pretending to be saving up for a plane ride home… he wanted to get a milk-shake in Burger King.

Anyways - that was the end to La Paz. We climbed out of the city of smog that never leaves, up to the altiplano, stopping randomly for passengers. Miraculously, no one stood in the aisle… which was good because that´s usually how you get robbed. Oh, and buses stop randomly, if there´s space, to put people in the aisle (and sometimes the luggage compartment … the luggage guy has his own section with a mattress and cabinet and blankets, and sometimes lets people ride with him). Such a surreal experience, this relatively new European-make bus stopping off for campesinos with market goods. It´s like a 747 stopping in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for a hitch-hiker… two worlds collide.

On the way out, as I sat half-dozing in one of the stops in El Alto, the million-person cinder-block city of dirt roads and goats and internet cafés where all the shoe-shiners come from (half-dozing because it was a sketchy part of town), looking out at the dirt fields and tin houses with plastic sheets for windows, I noticed a tiny wooden shed. Consejero Esperitista (Spiritual Counselor - except here they really mean spirits). I asked my seat-mate… he said, In case you have a ghost, or want to put a curse on someone, you go to them.

I should have been awake for more of the drive - it was stunning. We had climbed to 4.600m and now were flying through what could have been western Colorado or a pretty part of Wyoming (really, there are). The geological striations were all vertical, instead of the classic cliffs with horizontal layers. Here, if you wanted to walk up a hill you would only have to follow the path of the striation and it would take you directly over the top … Izzy and I had talked about how well this fit to Bolivia: a country knocked on its side by inexorable forces, helplessly being pushed over and down until you couldn´t tell which way was up or right or good anymore. The familiar becomes so muddled and out of context that it turns strange and un-settling.

The border was uneventful: boring and long. Except it happened to be at the foot of the Sajama volcano, in a national park, with llamas and flamingoes running round (first clue that this wasn´t western Colorado). Another border, 30min away, to enter Chile - through in under an hour. Almost immediately we started dropping, and the wild open altiplano of Bolivia faded and although there weren´t many habitations, the land somehow was more constrained and subdued…

I woke up boiling hot. We were in the desert, the Atacama, the driest in the world. Huge dunes on all sides, at least 35C (105F) in the bus… More sleep … dropping finally into the fertile river valleys near the coast - could have been southern spain except for the 1500m dunes making the valley walls. And then the ocean …

---